The Us Constitution: The Difficulty Of Adding An Amendment

1163 words - 5 pages

The United States Constitution is considered to be more concise as well as much older than the constitutions of other nations worldwide. Although the United States Constitution is mature, there are such a limited number of amendments that have been added to the Constitution since it was created. Only twenty-seven amendments, including the Bill of Rights, have been added to the Constitution since its creation. This is not due to amendments not being suggested, because over eleven thousand amendments have been contemplated; however, this is because the process of adding an amendment to the Constitution is an extremely long and difficult process. There are only four possible ways that an amendment can be added to the United States Constitution. Two of these four ways include the process that the amendment needs to go through to be proposed, and the other two ways deal directly with ratifying the amendment once it has been proposed (Sidlow, and Henschen 42).
Currently, there are only two specific ways to propose an amendment in hopes of getting it ratified into the United States Constitution. The first way includes obtaining a two-thirds vote for the amendment in both the United States Senate, and the United States House of Representatives (Sidlow, and Henschen 43). This process is much harder than it seems because of various reasons dealing with the Senate and the House of Representatives. One major factor that makes obtaining this two-thirds vote challenging is that the politicians within these two groups come from various political parties and political backgrounds. Some politicians are republicans, some democrats, some conservative, and some of them are liberal. This creates a problem when attempting to achieve a two-thirds vote. Seeing as to how the politicians differ, their views on certain topics differ making a two-thirds vote almost impossible. The second way in which an amendment can be proposed includes having two-thirds of the state legislature agreeing to request Congress to hold a national amendment convention. This particular process has never been successful because the majority of the politicians that are eligible to participate in such a thing have mixed emotions on the matter. Many politicians are doubtful in this method because they do not want it to become another Constitutional Convention altering the United States government completely. Therefore, proposing an amendment in this manner is slim to none (Sidlow, and Henschen 43).
When comparing methods for proposing an amendment, and methods for ratifying an amendment they both contain two possible options for doing so (Sidlow, and Henschen 42). To ratify a proposed amendment and allow it to become a part of the United States Constitution three-fourths of the state legislatures can have to vote in favor of the amendment. This method is considered to be the classic way that amendments are ratified, and out of the twenty-seven amendments that have made it through the amendment...

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